BARBARA MORGAN: INNER DIALOGUES We Hope to Show How the Creative Process Applies to More Than What Appears with the EXTERNAL WORLD in Museums, Libraries, and Theatres
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QUADRILLE VOL 5 NO 4 BENNINGTON COLLEGE ACTING EDITOR: Leslie Ullman MANAGING EDITOR: Joanna Clark Swayze '70 ALUMNI EDITOR: Catherine Cumpston, Alumni Director "In the self is housed.. a "EQUALIZING THE PRESSURES FROM WITHOUT" 2 place of stability In an unstable world." Excerpts from the Commencement Address by Anais Nin QUADRILLE is published four times a year by the Development Office at Bennington College. It is designed to reflect the views and opinions of students, faculty, administration, alumni, trustees, parents of students, and friends of the College. The editors of QUADRILLE invite articles, statements, opinion and comment, letters to the editor, photographs, graphics, and reviews from members of all the constituencies. FINDING A VOICE THROUGH MOVEMENT EDITOR'S NOTE An Interview with five Dance Majors To create is to make a kind of leap. What one can be fairly sure of is a point of beginning and a point of ending; in between, there may be a succession of starts and stops. and elements of risk, insight, frustration and discipline whose action can be defined only in retrospect. Having completed one, two, twenty works, a person is never quite sure of having a formula to create another. It is partially this uncertainty, we are sometimes told by paternal, aging artists with healthy portfolios and closets full of notebooks, that makes people keep creating. BARBARA MORGAN: INNER DIALOGUES We hope to show how the creative process applies to more than what appears WITH THE EXTERNAL WORLD in museums, libraries, and theatres. How it is part of what makes people get up, go somewhere, behave a certain way. How it is that primary. But as a mechanism of behavior, the creative process is also fragile in that it can disintegrate if one tries to become too aware of it in operation. So we have had to be careful. And especially, the people who speak in this issue have had to be careful. In the following pages, several students discuss the experience of putting together their final theses, exhibits, and concerts this spring. Dance photographer Barbara Morgan shares feelings about work she has been doing for forty years. Alumna and investment counselor Wilhelmina Eaton traces some of ".. If you get hooked on the personal detours and discoveries that led to her choice of profession. A one thing good and solid An Interview with the Blousteins 38 then you can experiment philosophy student interprets art critic Clement Greenberg's comments, made at with everything else." Bennington this spring, on the aims of art. Through this collection of individual statements and approaches, problems are examined such as how one copes with a "block," how to invent with someone else or under the guidance of a tutor, how to know if something is "finished," what effect an audience may have on a given work or on the feelings of the artist, how one might continue to grow as an artist COVER Antoinette Jacobson '71 or professional on one's own. Ideas are circulated that relate to the effects of success, the accommodation of failure, the relevance of chance encounters or 18 AT MID-THESIS Comments by Chris Stahl 21 "WHAT WOULD YOU everyday habits to an original idea. Excerpts from the Commencement Address RATHER BE, A DOCTOR OR A NURSE?" Pat Barr-Webster POEMS FROM by Anais Nin open the entire sequence with an emphasis on solitude and self- By 23 awareness; an interview with Ed and Ruth Ellen Bloustein on their forthcoming "THE ICE INSPECTOR" A Creative Thesis by Denise Provost 26 THE PATH OF move to Rutgers ends the sequence with the expression of their openness to the ONE "BENNINGTON-TRAINED SPIRIT" By Wilhelmina Eaton '50 SOME next step -the forceful, flexible attitude they take to the business of living. 28 It is significant that a year ago a QUADRILLE about "making things" would not STATEMENTS BY ART MAJORS 30 CIRKOOKOOSS A Project by Caroline have been even possibleto put together, much less a natural reflection of what Simonds and Deborah Borda 34 CLEMENT GREENBERG'S "BENNINGTON people were thinking about. To recognize, refine, and communicate an image of SEMINARS" A Critique by Susan Unger 42 NOTES FROM COMMONS one's own makes demands on personal energies which are often directed - or owed - to external causes. The demands from the outside certainly have not GALLEYS 46 FACULTY NOTES 48 EVENTS 50 WINDFEST By Karen Oram diminished; but this spring they were at least less urgent, less evocative of what '72 52 GRADUATION 1971 54 ALUMNI NOTES 56 REUNION 59 AnaisNin describes as "mass hypnotism." Many people around Bennington had ALUMNI CLASS NOTES more time to explore the landscape of concepts that arise from intense creative PHOTO CREDITS By Joanna Clark Swayze '70 except where indicated. activity. and to explore themselves as the initiators. And the fact that so many thought about their discoveries and were willing to discuss them, was something QUADRILLE BENNINGTON COLLEGE we found very exciting. Quadrille I "EQUALIZING THE PRESSURES FROM WITHOUT" Excerpts from Paris-born AnaisNin, formerly a dancer, assistant to renowned psychoanalyst the Commencement Address Otto Rank, and operator of her own printing press, is best known as a writer. Three volumes of her Diary have been published by Harcourt since 1966 and she by Anais Nin is author of a critical study on D.H. Lawrence and of several novels and short stories. Both her fiction and the Diary have been especially well received among members of the postwar generation, who have found in them not only a reflection of a rich and mobile life, but the expression of their own concern with individual consciousness and individual liberation. There was a taboo once, against looking into oursel.ves. This taboo is lifting. We have paid a very high price for it. with that second birth that we are able to offer other people a genuine self to which they can respond with confidence. One wonders why the journey into the self should be so terribly necessary at this We have two great fears of this rebirth. We have a fear of looking inward because we moment. It is because the more space we discover and the larger the universe becomes don't know what we will find and nobody can guide us except the psychologist. If we think and the more we learn and the farther we project ourselves into the adventurous outer of making the journey alone we are afraid. The other fear we have is of sharing the self; world, then the stronger we have to build an inner world. We have to equalize the and yet in this sharing is the only human, warm, near contact that we can know. The pressures from without. In the self is housed the human being; the heart and the feelings. Welsh people have a beautiful word for it which means the kind of talk that leads to It is a place of stability in an unstable world. intimacy. This is a kind of talk we cannot do unless we know ourselves and admit to our As most of you probably know, I found this out through the experience of the Diary. The feelings and recognize our dreams. Diary began when I was eleven years old and was being uprooted; when my family was The idea that it is necessary to return to the self in order to find stability and, more being separated and I was never to see my father again. The Diary became for me what important, that it is necessary to find the self in order to find others, especially applies to the Thailand people call "The House of the Spirit" - a little refuge within a strange land this moment in the history of woman. It is terribly important that women proceed first of and a strange language. This is how I first learned how we need this inner journey as all toward liberation from within, through a knowledge of themselves. There are really no much as we need the outer ones. generalizations, no slogans; each woman has to work out a pattern for herself. She has to Our culture had laid great stress on extroversion, and for a long time the idea of being find out where she is situated, what her difficulties are, what the obstacles are. And so preoccupied with the self - even the occupation of writing a diary, or of being at all she will find many of those obstacles are from within. And that a change from within concerned with one's-growth as I was -was considered almost sinful. As a child I used to makes an incalculable change on the outside; it affects everyone with whom she comes in remove the earth from under the flowers because I wanted to see how things grew - contact. which was a very scientific interest but which destroyed the flowers. I was able to do that One of the dangers of the loss of self is contagion - the facility with which we engage much more successfully in the Diary, destroying nothing, but watching this organic, in mass movements without even knowing what we are doing. Mass hypnotism. This is cellular, day-by-day discipline and work by which the self becomes something that can the way by which many countries have been led to great disasters. We have not realized resist catastrophe, can resist transplantation, can resist all the strange and unstable that the taboo on individual development is a terrible thing for the life of the community. things our world hands us. - An unhappy man is a danger to society; a happy man is a great profit to society.